Comparative Analysis of Domestic Violence and Immigration Research at Home and Abroad

• In Event: Poster Session

Abstract

This paper is a review of previous literature on immigrant women and domestic violence in Canada between the years 2000 and 2010. This review addresses the status of literature on domestic violence and immigration with specific focus on the theoretical frameworks and perspectives that inform the research findings and conclusions. This review involves a comparative analysis of Canadian literature and international literature from the United Kingdom, United States of America, Australia and New Zealand. This examination challenges the traditional analysis of the culture of abuse, rather attributes immigrant women’s experience of violence to broader systems and structures of power that perpetuate and trap immigrant women in the cycle of abuse. This review categorizes the literature into three frameworks, the cultural framework, structural framework, and the intersectional framework. This paper offers recommendations to shift research away from the limited analysis of cultural and structural frameworks to a more rounded and inclusive intersectional framework. The intersectional framework accounts for all elements of power and frames an analysis of battered immigrant women with their social location and social positioning of power as core to an analysis of abuse.

Author

• Nora Dikho, University of Ontario Institute of Technology